By PIPER KLEMM
Someone texted me the other day [sic]: “Sport is a privilege. It’s not a right. If it’s outside of someone’s means then in my opinion they need to alter their expectations until they can afford or put themselves is the right position to succeed or meet their own goals.”
I think most of us can agree that this statement is 1. True and 2. Brutal. Sport is a privilege. This sport is expensive. None of us are going to the Olympics and we all had to alter our expectations.
However, while it is true, it is not the sport most of us believe in. It’s not the sport we invest our lives into. It is not the sport of optimists and of our dreams. It’s not the sport of inspiration. It is not a sport of community. It is not the sport where education can lift us into places so much further than we could have ever imagined.
And in experience, while our sport is (very) far from a meritocracy, most of us over decades have seen and felt many cool happenings. We understand the joy of anticipation for the next big show, the support of our communities, we’ve seen education and hard work lift people far past where they ‘ought’ to be, and we’ve been inspired.
Because we’ve seen and experienced and witnessed so much magic, most of us are unwilling to succumb to the pessimism of the dismissal that Sport is simply a privilege for only those who can afford it. We see glimmers of hope, we’ve cheered when it’s gone right, and we’ve seen people become absolute forces of nature to make change in our industry. Sport is a privilege and we all need to alter our expectations and also shouldn’t there be a pipeline that occasionally someone truly extraordinary breaks through on merit anyways? Even if simply for the bread and circuses of the masses to be able to keep dreaming and imagining that it could be me out there jumping those jumps.
This text keeps living rent free in my head. Are horse shows just simply only for rich people and we should all just throw up our hands and give up? If we’re all being pushed toward incredibly expensive FEI classes, what is the role of USEF? How does the pipeline even work? The ceiling raises and raises on how good our top riders are, how incredible our top horses are, how great our trainers can and do train horses, how fast our vets can get horses back in the ring, how packed the VIP tent is, and how many people can afford all of these things.
(Also as an aside, are hunters sport? If not, are they simply just dying?).
When I’m lost, I always go back to basics. When I’m sitting on a horse and I don’t know what to do, in so many instances, taking a deep breath and stretching up through my core, lifting my chin, and elongating my leg are usually good ideas as I gather myself to try to face whatever challenge is currently or about to happen. Here, I went back to basics and read the Mission Statement of US Equestrian and the Vision Statement of US Equestrian, which I pasted here.
It’s not in their mission or vision to fund teams or medals or chase down top level sport. If we’re reading this in a vacuum of listening to their words and not considering their actions, their vision and mission reads rather folksy and down home grassroots. Reading their mission and vision, I get the warm and fuzzies. YES! This is what I want too!
Of what they’re spending money on, 36% is staffing. Their staff does not frequently look like they have any joy in horse sports. That could be necessary in bringing the joy to as many people as possible… how many more people are we bringing the joy to than we did 10 years ago? 20 years ago? None? And then when the numbers were so bad, instead of changing course, they simply started double counting people? Sport Programs make us 26% of the budget and I would challenge you to anyone building their community who has received $1 from USEF. The other 38% is Administrations and Operations. Instead of spreading joy, they spread a complicated janky system that is as unthought out as it is inaccurate. Instead of increasing access, they simply duplicate us and pat themselves on the back.
Fundamentally, US Equestrian is the governing body who wants the income and the prestige of being a governing body, but not the work of being a governing body. They appear to think they need respect in order to govern, but in reality, you earn respect by actually governing. Produce good and fair policies and decisions and your membership will respect you. Be capricious and arbitrary and it doesn’t matter what someone’s position is, you still won’t have people’s respect. It doesn’t matter what your official title is or your relationship to the international Olympic committee, you will not be respected if you are favoring cronyism over managing your sport.
They ostensibly do not feel respected by me and they do not seem to understand that respect is not an input. Respect is an output. I can and will respect them tomorrow if they make good decisions today. It seems like they want to be related to an actual government, which has a basic fallacy of principle–we cannot leave our government without leaving this country. People can simply opt out of the federation, and we watch our friends go to other disciplines, types of interacting with their horses, or simply opt out all together.
The irony of all this is that this is something that any good horse trainer knows. Trainers know they are respected by doing a good job and producing results, not by reigning terror. It’s almost like the people running us have not learned one of the most fundamental and simple lessons that horses have to teach us.
As a Life Member, Bill Moroney has not earned my respect. Vicki Lowell has not earned my respect. I did respect Tom O’Mara until I told him I would fly to Lexington to meet with the Board of Directors regarding a Vote of No Confidence for Bill Moroney and he did a bait and switch and I arrived at an ambush meeting with Bill Moroney and Sonja Keating instead. I do not respect Tom O’Mara at this time. I think good lawyers are snakes and we need a good lawyer at the Federation. Sonja Keating is not a horseperson and is pretty clueless about the intricacies of our sport after all these years, which seems like a lack of interest and is a complete red flag for me, but I do respect that she’s a snake lawyer. So, I suppose I respect Sonja Keating in her General Counsel role and do not respect her in her Chief Operating Officer role for the Federation.
When I think about the four of them, I simply don’t believe that they installed Murray Kessler as President of US Equestrian from 2017-2020 and never knew about his behavior toward women. I do not believe that he never treated subordinate females in inappropriate ways while leading the membership of US Equestrian. I do not believe that men wake up at age 66 and allegedly batter an employee for the first time in your life. Whether you’re a Murray fan or find him vile, as a member, the likelihood they’re exposing member funds to a civil suit seems higher than is necessary risk.
I am hoping that all of the red switches flip to green. I would love to write an article about my new viewpoint. I would love to be united under someone’s vision that I can both see and role up my sleeves and be a part of enacting.
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Back to basics, so is USEF an organization of outliers or is an organization to raise the floor? We all know what it is. It is the organization of Kent Farrington and McLain Ward and Laura Kraut. It is is an organization of gold medal producing world #1 unreal outliers. And that’s not what I think it should be. That’s not what I believe their mission reads as what they are supposed to be.
I believe that it is the stated compass of US Equestrian to raise the floor. To invest in spreading the joy we feel every single day at the barn. To share the quiet breath of curry combing a bay gelding in a stall with as many people as possible. To step in that puddle that was, well a lot deeper than we expected. To sit at your computer typing away which your rib still swollen from an absolute split second mistake ten days before. To smile at the privilege that we get to breathe around horses and be present for the best days of our lives. To see the joy of a first horse show, a first championship, and a first personal victory over challenging goals. To grow our sport and grow participation and grow access and grow the joy of horses.
We do not raise the floor by raising rates on the grassroots. We do not raise the floor with a complicated rulebook. We do not raise the floor by pouring millions of dollars onto teams of rich youth who wash out after a trip or two in their pinque coat. After watching all this play out last week, I can only come to the conclusion that US Equestrian is pushing down the floor to try to raise the ceiling rather than realizing that when you raise the floor, you raise the ceiling in the process.
I look at the system and as I look at it from the bottom up, I often focus on how we’re not serving the next generation en masse, but recently when I read Jimmy Torano’s post about investing in the next generation of top riders at the horse show and read all the frustration that Molly Ashe Cawley has, I see what a failure US Equestrian is at all levels. Their children are unparalleled in talent, hard work, access, connections, and tiger parents and yet, somehow, the system is failing to serve them as much as it is failing to serve all the rest of us. This is not us versus each other–every single one of us is being failed by a governing body who wants to play cronyism more than they want to lead. Their children are as held back by the failure to raise the floor as everyone else. The difference is, however, they have the ear of the people who have the power to fix it and the rest of us do not.
So, how can we be solution oriented? I think those who are cosplaying leaders need to be removed. We need a mechanism to remove any current and future leadership who have been corrupted absolutely by power and “influence.”
The Board of Directors of USEF are the only ones who can save us. One vote of No Confidence and they will all fall like a house of cards. Look at Murray Kessler-they all turned their backs on him so fast when the tides changed after a decade of defending his behavior. This can easily happen to Sonja Keating, Vicki Lowell, Bill Moroney, and Tom O’Mara. I suspect they will all throw each other under the bus to save themselves–after last week, we can confidently say that that is their modus operandi. Keep the pressure on.
The only people that can save us are:
Max Amaya
Britt McCormick
Tom O’Mara
Beezie Madden
Chester Weber
Jacob Arnold
Eleanor Brimmer
Jon Krietz
Will Faudree
Lisa Gorretta
Melissa Moore
Deborah Johnson
Sharon White
Judith Sloan
Joseph Mattingley
Ling Fu Wylie
Sydney Elliott
Judith Werner
Diane Pitts
Please get in touch and ask them to do the right thing.
